Internet 2009 in numbers

What happened with the Internet in 2009? How many websites were added? How many emails were sent? How many Internet users were there? This post will answer all of those questions and many more. Prepare for information overload, but in a good way.

We have used a wide variety of sources from around the Web. A full list of source references is available at the bottom of the post for those interested. We here at Pingdom also did some additional calculations to get even more numbers to show you.

Email

* 90 trillion - The number of emails sent on the Internet in 2009.
* 247 billion - Average number of email messages per day.
* 1.4 billion - The number of email users worldwide.
* 100 million - New email users since the year before.
* 81% - The percentage of emails that were spam.
* 92% - Peak spam levels late in the year.
* 24% - Increase in spam since last year.
* 200 billion - The number of spam emails per day (assuming 81% are spam).

Websites

* 234 million - The number of websites as of December 2009.
* 47 million - Added websites in 2009.